Lydia Mokdessi and Sarah Rose Leonard

Dear Culturebot readers,

We’ve been here for months but we haven’t yet introduced ourselves. Whoops. Hello! As many of you know, Culturebot founder Andy Horwitz has moved to San Diego and turned editorial responsibilities over to Lydia Mokdessi, a writer/dancer/choreographer, and Sarah Rose Leonard, a writer/dramaturg/director. Andy, Lydia, and Sarah have been discussing what this shift entails for a while and we’d like to give you a heads up about our vision for Culturebot moving forward.

Culturebot is a lateral endeavor, with Lydia and Sarah overseeing content. The Editors work alongside their peers to generate content and build discursive skills within their fields.

Culturebot hosts periodic community-building events. Lydia and Sarah have initiated dance and theatre peer groups, respectively, in order to build supportive, rigorous community, develop new skills, share resources, network, and generally have a good time.

We are very excited to be doing this work; our artistic statement is below for your viewing pleasure. We look forward to engaging with our communities and readers!

Warmly,
Lydia and Sarah Rose

P.S.: Please consider this note an open invitation to pitch article ideas to us; let us know what kind of writing you would like to see! Feel free to contact us at lydia@culturebot.org and sarah@culturebot.org.

Artistic Statement

Culturebot is a publication that highlights critical thought about experimental performance. We use publishing as an act of legitimation for a marginalized sector of the art world. We do not publish traditional reviews, but seek to enter into dialogue with work through critical thought that takes on various creative forms. Works published include personal responses to performance, long form and short form interviews with artists, post-show conversations, visual responses, essays, poems, videos, and podcasts. We strive for our writing to point out from the performance rather than pointing at it. (What is a work of performance doing? What are we thinking about while witnessing? What does it say about our field? What does it say about our world?) We consider what resonates beyond the work rather than “did I like it?” or “is it good or bad?”. Our contributors acknowledge their place as artists writing about their peers and seek to remove the barrier between critic and maker. Culturebot seeks to expand how we talk about art and challenges our notion of acceptable forms for discussion.